Blog #4: EOTO

    For our 'Each One Teach One' assignment, I decided to research the app Spotify. I chose Spotify because it is an app that my whole family has been using since I was in middle school, and I am really familiar as well as fond of the app. Even though I know how to navigate the app very well, after I started doing my research, I was surprised by the history of Spotify that I found, as well as all of the accomplishments that the app has had since first launching the app more than ten years ago. 

    Spotify is an audio streaming and music services provider. The app was first created by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzen on April 23, 2006 in Sweden. The name of the app was created by chance, when Ek and Lorentzen were trying to come up with a company name, they decided to combine the words 'spot' and 'identify'. The company was created to deal with the ongoing problem of music privacy. Before music streaming services were made popular, many people downloaded pirated music files, which was a huge blow to the music industry as a whole. 

    Spotify was first introduced to the public on October 7, 2008, and it was only accessible by invitation only. At that point, the streaming service was only available to users in Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. In 2009, Spotify made free, but limited services available to users in the United Kingdom. Today, Spotify can be used in 79 different countries, and the company is currently working on expanding and making their services available to even more countries and territories. 

    Spotify now accomplishes their initial goal of audience appeal because they don't sell music; they instead sell access to it. Nothing is for sale because everything is available for the user. Thanks to the machine learning technology of Spotify, it is able to analyze user data, and suggest music to each individual user based off the music and podcasts they have previously listened to. Now, the app is focusing on growing their podcast selections, by paying podcasts to broadcast their shows exclusively on Spotify. In 2021, Spotify bought Alexandra Cooper's podcast titled "Call Her Daddy", which was previously owned by Barstool Sports. The podcast was first introduced in 2018, and has since become the number one podcast on all the podcast charts. Since the podcast was a worldwide success, Spotify offered Cooper a $60 million contract in order to have her podcast exclusively streamed on Spotify. This attracted more users to download the app, since that was the only place where they could listen to the podcast. With this deal being a huge success, the company plans on making contracts with more popular podcasts in the near future.

    
    The Digital Media Association reported that since the introduction of Spotify in 2009, music piracy is down by more than 50%. Today, Spotify is the world’s largest music streaming service provider, with over 381 million monthly active listeners, including 172 million paid subscribers (family accounts can include up to six listeners on one bill), as of September 2021. The negatives of Spotify include their user plans. If you choose to use the free version, the sound quality is weaker, and users are also required to listen to advertisements.